We propose to develop an open federation (to be called the SMETE Open Federation) to integrate and support the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education (SMETE) Digital Library (NSDL).With headquarters at UC Berkeley, the group leading the development and providing the integrative core of the SMETE Open Federation is comprised of two lead organizations:
(1) the SMETE.ORG Alliance, with over twenty participating partners covering a broad range of SMET disciplines in K-12 and higher education, and
(2) the University of Missouri-Columbia with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, Virginia Tech and the Online Computer Library Center.
Our team has extensive experience in all of the key areas needed to develop and support a National SMETE Digital Library.We have worked with metadata, information retrieval, hypertext, database management, human-computer interaction, information visualization, distributed computing, cluster computing, networking (including Internet2) and related fields. We are engaged in research and development related to both harvesting federated search, as well as interoperability, scalability, usability and personalization. We have developed extensive software environments and toolkits. We are leaders in developing communities to support SMET education at all levels, from K-12 to higher education, from student to teacher, and from
administrator to academic policy-maker. We are also leaders in the development of technology-enhanced teaching and learning and in both K-12 and higher education in SMET disciplines. Our track record highlights our long-term commitment to promoting diversity and excellence in SMET education for learners of all ages, at all stages, and to creating a quality SMET education digital library that serves the public good.
The SMETE Open Federation will build the technological and community infrastructures needed to establish a stable, sustainable and scalable premier portal through which learners and teachers gain access to high-quality, technologically-enabled resources to strengthen learning in SMET education. Our technological infrastructure will allow SMETE collections to share key services such as federated search and personalization; a means to develop strongly coupled collections and services; a means to integrate the wealth of bibliographic and primary source material in educationally relevant ways and mechanisms that provide seamless access across all systems connected with the NSDL program. Our community infrastructure will engage the SMET education community towards collaborative, multidisciplinary, multi-institution projects involving curricular reform, innovative pedagogy and teaching practices involving digital libraries. Together we will form a synergistic system of collaborators needed to catalyze and support high quality SMET education for the NSDL program. As we have made substantial progress during the pilot phase of the NSDL program and have an perational prototype at www.smete.org, we are ideally positioned to develop a fully functional core integration system for the National SMETE Digital Library. We propose to deliver the premier portal to the NSDL program by September 2002 and coordinate the development of the National SMETE Digital Library through at least 2006.